The Drumbeat of Political Partisanship: Blocking Out the Noise

The drumbeat of political partisanship drowns out our ability to think.?The strategy of the political class is to keep us disoriented and move our collective eye from the ball.?So, this is my bullet point attempt to help us stay FOCUSED:

1.???The Supreme Court’s decision is final.?

2.???The Supreme Court must decide by 5 September 2022.?Their reasoning can follow after the decision.

3.???The original and unadulterated Form 34A is what represents how Kenyans voted.?It is the will of the Kenyan people.

4.???The process of sharing the Forms 34A whilst far from perfect was, on the face of it, an improvement, from previous elections.?There was an apparent transparency in the process which was absent in previous elections.

5.???Nothing credible I have read suggests that the mathematical tabulation used to declare the results for the Presidential election was wrong. ?Check out Charles Hornsby’s blog for a data driven and reliable third-party tabulation.

6.???The only legitimate argument then that can be made is that some of the information in the portal was itself the product of cyber-crime: essentially that fake Forms 34A were used to tabulate the results or conceivably that the original Forms 34A were altered, although doing this at scale would be a gargantuan task.

7.???All other arguments are essentially noise, whatever the legions of lawyers may say.

8.???There are two ways to interrogate this issue:

i) The first is to conduct an IT audit of the IEBC servers to establish whether their security has been tampered with.

ii) The second, more tedious, but in fact more definitive method, is to physically verify the physical Form 34As (which are in the IEBC’s possession) against the digital versions and the version used to tabulate the results.?

9.???The Supreme Court, properly guided, should focus its energies on this singular issue of cybercrime and verify whether it stands the test of scrutiny.??It is essentially a forensic and not a legal exercise and with the right resources is easily verifiable before 5 September.

If the Supreme Court is constrained for time, then undertaking a verification of say, 1,000 forms which are alleged to be false, would represent, in mathematical terms, a statistically significant enough sample.

If material discrepancies are found between these forms and those used to create the final Forms 34B and then the final Form 34C, there would be grounds to challenge the declaration that William Ruto is President-Elect. If not, then the declaration by Chairman Chebukati must stand.

10.??Going forward, let us:

a)???unite in the knowledge that our political class–of all shades and all parties–is bereft of a moral compass.

b)??remember that our political class only make self-serving arguments.

c)???not place our dreams, hopes and aspirations in their hands: they will only ever let us down.

d)??remember that rule of law and accountability are the only methods by which we bring them to heel. There are no short-cuts here and no hope for salvation from a messianic leader.?We don’t have any political leaders of that kind. Our system does not produce them.?Grow up and smell the roses if you think otherwise.

e)??never forget, as Abdulmalik Sugow and I have previously argued, that the IEBC was institutionally designed to fail.?We are where we are not by bad luck or happenstance but because the system was designed this way.?

Our leaders wanted an IEBC that could be divided, that had no proper governance and where Commissioners cannot agree on the basic functions and roles.?

They wanted this precisely to create the chaos that has unfolded, to provide leverage in case the results did not go as planned. Whoever the next government is comprised of, if they are not prepared to legislate for the creation and empowerment of an election management body with governance and technology freed from political interference, do NOT vote for them, because they want to game the system. Stay FOCUSED on reform of the electoral system.

f)???remember that the immediate problems that confront us - a spiraling debt burden, drought and climate change, inflation making Kenyans poorer daily, an exchange rate in free fall - are not being tackled as we watch these dramas.

Every passing day is costing us as Kenyans dearly.?Are any of our leaders worth this? I personally don’t think so. Does this mean we should lose hope in a better future? Not necessarily. However, for our hopes to materialise, they should be tempered by our focus on holding institutions accountable and speaking truth to power.